Harvard University hired a drag performer as a new professor — who is expected to teach a class on TV show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in the spring semester, the Ivy League school announced over the summer
The institution welcomed Kareem Khubchandani in a July message to the college community and revealed that the visiting professor from Tufts University will teach in the Studies of Gender and Sexuality program thanks to the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus.
Khubchandani is perhaps better known by his stage name, “LaWhore Vagistani” — a persona that the academic has made an integral part of their pedagogy.
The professor will often lecture in the guise of “LaWhore,” which has been a personal project for over a decade, even spawning a music video titled “Sari.”
In an interview with his own drag persona published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015, Khubchandani spilled the tea on the origin of the off-putting stage name.
“My name is LaWhore Vagistan, my preferred pronouns are ‘she’ or ‘aunty.’ I chose ‘LaWhore’ because my family traces its origins to Pakistan: Lahore is an important city in Pakistan, and well, I’m a bit of a w*ore,” the drag queen said.
“And Vagistan because I see the subcontinent as one, big, beautiful Vag … istan,” he wrote in the tacky, naval-gazing self-interview.
Khubchandani will teach just two classes over the course of two semesters — “Queer Ethnography” in the fall and “RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire” in the spring semester, according to Harvard’s announcement.
The latter class will apparently focus on the cable television show “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
The Tufts University associate professor of theater, dance, and performance studies has authored the books “Decolonizer Drag” and “Ishstyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife” and is debuting his newest tome this fall — “Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties.”
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